Will America Now Have a Pravda?

With Breitbart’s Steve Bannon now in a seat of White House power, Donald Trump will have a weapon no president has ever wielded.

By
Alex Spence

11/14/16, 6:24 PM CET

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take control of the American executive branch, he will have a weapon at his disposal that few if any presidents have enjoyed—a direct connection to a faithful media operation that reaches millions of loyal populist readers in the form of Breitbart, the self-styled honey badger of alt-right journalism.

Other presidents have had strategies for going around the mainstream media. Franklin Roosevelt had his Fireside Chats on the radio, but his broadcasts were sporadic and rarely ran more than half an hour long. Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson enjoyed direct lines to the top at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the television networks, where they directed their angry Bat-calls in hopes of manipulating coverage.

But in Breitbart, Trump has an international Web tribune for his message. It’s run by the man Trump just named as his chief strategist: Stephen Bannon, who will serve as co-#2 in the White House with Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. And depending how Bannon shapes it, Breitbart could become the closest thing the United States has ever had to a “state-run media enterprise,” to quote a phrase by a former Breitbart spokesman.

Breitbart’s aggressive, antagonistic, and race-tinged journalism echoed the darker edges of Trump’s message throughout the campaign. Breitbart continually defined the far right boundary of the Trump universe withheadlines like “Physician: Mainstream Media ‘Strangely Silent’ About Hillary Clinton’s Health,” “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew,” and “Hillary Clinton’s Muslim Brotherhood Problem.” It backed Trump’s lies about observing thousands of Muslim’s celebrating the toppling of the towers on 9/11, it one-upped his anti-immigrant stand, and it regularly predicted published stories predicting his victory in the general election when everybody else said he was a goner.

And its outsider status in the media world comports perfectly with Trump’s historically anti-media campaign. Other presidents have had combative relationships with the press, for sure: President Richard Nixon put journalists on his enemies list, his administration wiretappedreporters, and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, went on the hustings to denounce the “instant analysis and querulous criticism” of network news anchors. But most of the anti-press stylings of previous administrations were covert in their formulation and execution. Trump’s have been overt. During the campaign he promised to bring the press to heel by “opening up“ the libel laws to make it easier to bring and win suits against publications. He has singled out individual reporters as “sleazy,” “extremely dishonest,” “unfair,” and “not good people” and blacklistedindividual reporters from access to his campaign. At rallies, he fed his audience the raw meat of press hatred. As Slate’s Seth Stevenson recentlywrote, he used the press pens to “other” reporters and expose them to his ridicule. Stevenson continued:

“Behold, Trump said to his fans, I’ve rounded up a passel of those elites you detest. And I’ve caged them for you! Allow me to belittle them for your delight. Here, now you take a turn—go ahead, have at it! Do it again, don’t be shy!”

If past is prologue, we can expect Trump to maintain his hatred of the mainstream press, and even increase it. As many have noted already, having vanquished “Crooked Hillary,” he needs a visible foil, and until an individual appears to absorb his five minutes of hate, the press will be a fine substitute.

Other presidents have needed to be covert because they needed the press as a vehicle. Thanks to Breitbart, Trump may not. Though unread by the majority of Americans, it has a powerful reach on Facebook – higher than many mainstream outlets – and a direct emotional connection to the new populist Republican base that carried Trump to his shocking victory. With Bannon so close to Trump’s office, we can expect Breitbart will coordinate with the Trump White House, functioning as his ministry of information as it did during the campaign, and going on the attack to keep renegade legislators in line. If this sounds theoretical, it’s not: Just three hours after Bannon was named to his new post, Breitbart went directly after Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, publishing a story suggesting he was losing support from some GOP members.

The Trump-Breitbart connection wasn’t defined solely by political affinity, according to an August 2015 report in BuzzFeed by McCay Coppins. Unnamed Breitbart staffers believe Trump had traded financial backing for positive coverage on the site—an assertion that Bannon denied. According to Coppins, one staffer claimed that Breitbart “managers had overruled editors at Trump’s behest.” Another connection: the hedge fund manager Robert Mercer is reportedly a major Breitbart backer; his daughter has now been named to Trump’s transition team.

But the question of money aside, what will Breitbart do now to convey Trump’s arguments and his wishes directly into the media stream? Will Sommer, who scrutinizes the right-wing journalist universe in his weeklynewsletter, went to Twitter on Sunday to publish his post-victory assessment of the site. “Breitbart has been playing things quiet—far right politics but no major racial/anti-Semitic outrages” since the election, Sommer wrote.

It would be rational to predict that Breitbart would now start issuing propaganda in service of their maximum leader, aping the glorious sloganeering perfected by the North Koreans, or continue to indulge its racist and anti-Semitic sensibilities. But the Breitbart brass isn’t dumb. The agit-prop of the campaign suited Trump’s needs when he was an outsider, banging on the door to be let in. Now inside, Trump needs a press organ that can explain his successes to more than just the Trump faithful and that can also go to war with Trump’s enemies in the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the banks, Ford Motor Co., Carrier, the immigration lobby, Planned Parenthood, Jeff Bezos, Paul Ryan, the Supreme Court, CNN, and various special interests.

For ammo, Trump will have the entire publicity apparatus of the executive branch. Back in the 1939, H.L. Mencken griped about the contaminating effect the army of press agents that President Roosevelt assembled to fill the info-sphere with news releases and other handouts. Undiscerning reporters would retype and file this gifts as news, helping to advance the FDR line. Reporters aren’t that instantly corruptible these days, but the Trump administration will be no less committed to working the press with information extracts that can be cooked up into Trump-flattering news.

There are no real parallels in history to a president having an entire media platform controlled by one of his closest advisors, but we did see a press vehicle for the party in power arise once before: the conservativeWashington Times in the 1980s. Funded by convicted felon Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the Washington Times was adopted by the Reagan administration, which fed it stories and gave it access to help advance the Reagan line. By virtue of its default status as the Reagan news bureau, theWashington Times became the place where Republicans talked to one another and fought internal political battles. There’s no reason why a similarly sourced Breitbart couldn’t function as the Republican fountainhead if it imitated the 1980s Washington Times.

If that were the model, you could expect the Trump administration to feed the Breitbart “scoops” that make the administration shine, and to leak information that will injure his enemies.

But again, Breitbart under Bannon has been smarter and far more strategic than that. In an October 2015 profile of Bannon by Bloomberg Businessweek’s Joshua Green, Green explained how Breitbart and company had “hacked” the mainstream media by supporting investigative work that the conventional press picks up. Bannon’s Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer wrote Clinton Cash, which “probably did more to shape public perception of Hillary Clinton than any of the barbs from her Republican detractors,” Green correctly writes, as its finding were picked up by every major news organization and expanded upon.

“We have a mantra,” Bannon told Green. “Facts get shares, opinions get shrugs.” As chief strategist for the Trump administration, Bannon now sits on the largest pile of valuable facts in the Western Hemisphere. If he stays true to his mantra and manages his pile shrewdly, he won’t need to avail himself of the crude manipulations so manifest in Breitbart’s most crude and ultra-sordid ravings. As Trump’s minister of information, he won’t need to make propaganda, only news.

Authors:

Alex Spence

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BasherA

“The closest thing the U.S. has ever had to a state-run media enterprise.” – uhhhh, wrong, there’s this thing called Voice of America which is a web- and radio- news organization which receives 100% of its funding ($211,000,000 annually) from the U.S. government and is run by a 9-member board all of whom are appointed by the President.